"Chidori!!"
The screech of electricity split the morning air—and a blinding white sphere of crackling current coalesced in Sasuke's outstretched fingers. The sight made the black-haired boy's eyebrow arc upward in genuine surprise.
Strange. That felt—
He knew what was surprising him. Yesterday, he'd only read through Chidori's release principle and gone over the notes. This was his first attempt at actually producing the technique.
A-rank. Even the best chūnin couldn't reliably pull off an A-rank jutsu. His plan had been to spend the coming weeks working toward it—not to conjure it like this, on the first try, as easily as breathing.
He stared at the sparking ball of lightning in his palm. He wasn't given to self-delusion—he knew his talent wasn't at "instant mastery of A-rank jutsu" territory. And yet here this was, undeniably real.
"Is this actually an A-rank jutsu?"
He muttered it to himself, frowning as he let the discharge die out. The technique had cost him a significant amount of chakra, yes. But the difficulty of producing it had felt—nonexistent.
"It is. And not just any A-rank—it's among the finest."
Hinata dropped noiselessly onto a nearby training post. She'd watched Sasuke produce Chidori from start to finish through the Byakugan, and the reason was immediately clear to her.
Chidori, at its core, was the concentration of a massive quantity of lightning-natured chakra into a dense mass at the palm—essentially advanced nature transformation given a weapon shape. Nature transformation was normally a high-level technique, accessible only at the jōnin level. But the South Dipper Sacred Fists conditioning had bypassed that requirement entirely: weeks of targeted training with medicinal supplements, plus the specialized gauntlets, had already forced Sasuke's chakra system to accommodate lightning-natured output ahead of schedule. What remained was simply gathering chakra in the palm—and for a practitioner with Sasuke's fine chakra control, that was child's play.
"Tch. It's you." Sasuke crossed his arms with mild irritation. He'd been saving Chidori to surprise her. Now it felt anticlimactic. A jutsu he'd expected to challenge him had turned out to offer no challenge at all—its own kind of disappointment.
"The situation from last night seems settled. More or less—with a perfect scapegoat already in custody, none of the blame was ever going to land on any of them."
Hinata's mouth curved with a particular cool satisfaction. "Anyway—where's Naruto? I've got the next training phase."
Sasuke's eyes narrowed. His fingers pressed closed almost involuntarily. "...So it's finally here."
He retrieved Naruto from wherever Naruto had wandered—hauled back by the collar, dusty and apparently mid-drill, and from the look of him, his training had clearly been far harsher than Sasuke's.
"Hm? What's up, Hinata? I'm still working on the new moves~"
Naruto rubbed his shoulder, wearing the same impervious good cheer as always. Apparently last night had already been filed and forgotten.
"Do you even know what the word 'worried' means? Never mind—"
Hinata pressed her fingers to her temple, decided that the interior of Naruto's skull was not worth investigating, and dropped three scrolls onto the ground. "New conditioning phase for the Sacred Fists. Read through your scrolls."
"Oh, finally!!"
Naruto and Sasuke's eyes lit up simultaneously. They each picked up their respective scroll and read in silence—then, without quite planning to, glanced at each other. Whatever the contents were, they'd surprised both of them. Having been surprised by Hinata multiple times already, neither felt moved to make noise about it—but the expressions were eloquent.
"This method... will it actually work?"
Sasuke looked up at Hinata with a faintly dubious frown. Naruto pulled a face conveying much the same sentiment. "I think... okay, but—what does 'chakra control' actually mean? Like, technically?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. The degree of precision with which you can govern your own chakra output. Whether it's ninjutsu or taijutsu, anything that requires more deliberate, fine-grained action connects back to this."
She cut off whatever question was forming before it could leave their mouths. "Less talking, more doing. You'll understand once you're in it. Follow me—the materials are easy to find."
Sasuke and Naruto had more or less adjusted to Hinata's approach to things-that-are-apparently-self-explanatory. The three of them bought what they needed from the Konoha market, hauled it back to the Uchiha compound in large boxes, and set to work.
"Start from the lowest output level—get your chakra running smooth and steady, then step it up from there."
Hinata upended her cardboard box into a wooden bucket. A cascade of fat, dry, golden kernels rattled in—plump and impeccably dried. As food ingredients went, excellent corn kernels.
Yes. Corn. That was Hinata's training implement for this phase. Admittedly strange-sounding. Nevertheless, accurate.
"As long as it actually makes me stronger, I don't have objections."
Sasuke opened his box with a slight furrow and produced a small paper box from inside it. He opened that one too. Nestled within, unmistakably: a standard household light bulb. He had a crate of them.
"This is such obvious training—is it really necessary?"
Naruto grumbled as he opened his box—printed with fruit illustrations—and extracted one shiny red apple. His crate was full of them, fat and juice-heavy.
"Nobody said 'obvious' means 'easy.' And given what happened last night, I'd have thought you'd developed some sense of how dangerous the world actually is. Apparently not."
Hinata frowned, pulled on her gauntlets, and carefully pinched a single corn kernel between the index finger and thumb of her right hand. This training phase was—from her personal perspective—already far more civilized than anything they'd done before. No cliff drops, no electric shock conditioning, no iron-sand workouts. No danger at all. But the simpler the task, sometimes the harder it was to do perfectly.
Under her Byakugan's watch, the chakra in her palm began to gather—slowly, deliberately. The gauntlets converted the fire-natured chakra into actual flame, which flowed into the kernel between her fingers.
Visibly, the kernel expanded—then blackened—and with a sharp little pop, turned to charcoal.
"Tch. Failed."
Hinata stared at the small dark lump in her palm and rendered her verdict.
The objective was now obvious.
She was trying to use her fingertips to make popcorn.
It sounded absurd. It wasn't. Proper popcorn required maintaining a precisely steady, sustained heat inside the kernel—high enough, but not precipitous. Rush the temperature and the kernel burst the wrong way—gone in a flash of char before it had a chance to properly pop. The challenge was exactly the output she was worst at: gradual, constant, gentle, unwavering. This was the opposite of everything her training had conditioned her body to produce.
It was the problem of being able to kill a mosquito with one punch, easily—and having no idea how to not kill it.
If she could train her chakra output down to the precision required to make popcorn bare-handed, her fine control at every other level would follow.
Sasuke's situation was the same in a different element.
An expression of mild embarrassment crossed Sasuke's face as he pinched the base of a light bulb between his fingers and began—carefully—releasing lightning-natured chakra. The gauntlet converted it into live current. The effect: the bulb lit brilliantly for half a second, then detonated with a sharp bang.
Shards of glass peppered Sasuke's face. He bit out a curse.
His training: supply steady electrical current to the light bulb in his hand—keep it lit, continuous, stable. Bulb dies or explodes: failure.
"Yowch—!!"
From across the courtyard came Naruto's yelp of distress, immediately followed by the sight of her standing there covered in apple juice, the apple in her hand looking like someone had taken seventeen haphazard swings at it.
Naruto's task: use wind-natured chakra in the palm to peel the apple—separate skin from flesh cleanly and completely without damaging the fruit beneath. Complete that and the training was passed. Everything else: failure.
The three looked at each other. No one spoke. Then, in quiet and resigned unison, a shared sigh.
They had made the difficulty perfectly clear to themselves.
Human popcorn machine. Human lamp socket. Human apple peeler. That summed up this training phase.
All three demanded chakra output that was precise, fine-grained, sustained, and smooth—controlled rather than explosive. Theoretically, the approach was flawless. Pull this off and the control improvement would be significant—not ten levels, maybe, but six or seven was easily achievable.
Pop!! "Tch—!!"
Bang!! "Damn—!!"
Crack!! "Ow—!!"
And so a series of small, frequent explosions began emanating steadily from the Uchiha compound, showing no signs of stopping any time soon.